Cultural Aspects of the Business
A company’s culture is the set of priorities that it gives to different things. Sometimes these priorities are made explicit: in a company’s formal mission statement, for example, or in the structure of the organisation and the power given to different departments and functions. Sometimes they are implicit: what the Financial Times once called “the large number of unspoken assumptions and beliefs which managers in the organisation share about ‘the way we do things around here’”.
Tom Tierney, a former managing partner of Bain & Co, says: “A corporation’s culture is what determines how people behave when they are not being watched.” Several things shape a corporation’s culture.
- The employees’ behaviour
New recruits in any business usually do what they see, not what they are told. This can range from dress codes to such things as respect for technology and for standard working hours. It can also include the importance given to symbols; for example, to exclusive parking spaces, or to the way that senior managers are addressed, by their first name, or family name, or just by their initials. Employees’ behaviour is also influenced by stories and myths. These record the exploits of legendary leaders of the past, or of famous failures. By the traits that they expose they give strong signals of what is and what is not acceptable, for example, wild alcoholic bingeing or sexual harassment.
- The employee selection process
The type of person recruited by an organisation reflects and reinforces its culture. In his book Inside Organisations, Charles Handy colourfully described the way that recruits were selected by the Brooke family to help them run the rather large British colony of Sarawak, an area that the family virtually controlled in the years before the second world war. Handy went on to say that the Brooke family’s case “exemplifies the homogeneous style of organisations in those days”. Companies were stuffed with like-minded individuals who exemplified “group think”, a recognised condition in which groups of similar people develop a mindset that is immune to outside influence and the real world.
- The nature of the business
Certain industries, such as the movie business or banking, foster a particular culture. New high-technology firms also foster their own (often Silicon-Valley-influenced) culture. Computer maker Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has for a long time been conscious of its culture (The HP Way) and has worked hard to maintain it over the years through extensive training. Hewlett-Packard’s culture is based on respect for others, a sense of community and plain old hard work.
- The external environment
Companies need to take into account the culture of the society in which they are operating. American multinationals, for instance, cannot transpose the methods of Milwaukee straight into downtown Mombasa and expect to have a harmonious operation. One of the few areas of management study that has been dominated by Europeans rather than Americans is cross-cultural management. Europeans have a natural advantage. Fons Trompenaars, an authority in the field, once wrote that his Dutch father and his French mother gave him “an understanding of the fact that if something works in one culture, there is little chance that it will work in another”.